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Cooley marshals a wealth of evidence to demonstrate the devastating
consequences of the alliance between the US government and radical
Islam - from the assassination of Sadat, the destabilization of
Algeria and Chechnya and the emergence of the Taliban, to the
bombings of the World Trade Center and the US embassies in Africa.
Cooley examines the crucial role of Pakistan's military
intelligence organization; uncovers China's involvement and its
aftermath; the extent of Saudi financial support; the role of
America's most wanted man, the guerrilla leader Osama bin Laden;
the BCCI connection; and the CIA's cynical promotion of drug
traffic in the Golden Crescent. This text seeks out the lessons to
be learned from this still unfolding drama. This revised edition
examines the events of September 11th 2001, Osama bin Laden's role
and the complex working of the Al Queda terror network. It also
covers the important events in Pakistan since the military coup of
October 1999 and the impact of this on Indo-Pakistani relations.
This should be of interest to anyone who wants to understand the
roots of the international crisis.
Governments are common to all societies, although their forms,
goals, methods and intents vary widely. The government of the
United States has rested lightly upon its citizens in the past, but
this has been changing in the past century, and the rate of change
has been increasing. These changes are impacting our freedoms,
bypassing the Constitution and leading to basic modifications in
our form of government. This small book explores a number (by no
means exhaustive) of the problems, dangers and trends in the
political scene. It bears heavily on the politicians, corruption
and legalities of modern government while exploring some ideas and
changes that might regain us a strong, Constitutional, smaller and
more efficient government.
What I lacked and what I needed,"" confessed Samuel Clemens in
1908, "was grandchildren." Near the end of his life, Clemens became
the doting friend and correspondent of twelve schoolgirls ranging
in age from ten to sixteen. For Clemens, "collecting" these
surrogate granddaughters was a way of overcoming his loneliness, a
respite from the pessimism, illness, and depression that dominated
his later years. In Mark Twain's Aquarium, John Cooley brings
together virtually every known communication exchanged between the
writer and the girls he called his "angelfish." Cooley also
includes a number of Clemens's notebook entries, autobiographical
dictations, short manuscripts, and other relevant materials that
further illuminate this fascinating story. Clemens relished the
attention of these girls, orchestrating chaperoned visits to his
homes and creating an elaborate set of rules and emblems for the
Aquarium Club. He hung their portraits in his billiard room and
invented games and plays for their amusement. For much of 1908, he
was sending and receiving a letter a week from his angelfish.
Cooley argues that Clemens saw cheerfulness and laughter as his
only defenses against the despair of his late years. His
enchantment with children, years before, had given birth to such
characters as Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Huck Finn. In the
frivolities of the Aquarium Club, it found its final expression.
Cooley finds no evidence of impropriety in Clemens behavior with
the girls. Perhaps his greatest crime, the editor suggests, was in
idealizing them, in regarding them as precious collectibles. "He
tried to trap them in the amber of endless adolescence," Cooley
writes. ""By pleading that they stay young and innocent, he was
perhaps attempting to deny that, as they and the world continued to
change, so must he.
What amount of pain is required to produce a terrorist? What
happens when that terrorist becomes the master of sophisticated
weapons - and uses them? What if that terrorist is immune to
attack? How many millions will have to die before the President
will place peace ahead of politics, and sit down to negotiate? What
if he comes to the negotiating table with an empty hand? What if
the terms for peace place a fearsome responsibility on all persons,
from criminal to university professor? The answers must be found
when the nation faces the ultimate terrorist, the one they call
'The Madman'.
Boyhood is the most familiar province of Mark Twain's fiction, but
a reader doesn't have to look far to find feminine territory--and
it's not the perfectly neat and respectable place where you'd
expect to see Becky Thatcher. This is a fictional world where
rather than polishing their domestic arts and waiting for marriage
proposals, girls are fighting battles, riding stallions, rescuing
boys from rivers, cross-dressing, debating religion, hunting,
squaring off against angry bulls, or, in what may be the most
flagrant flouting of Victorian convention, marrying other women.
This special edition brings together the best of Twain's stories
about unconventional girls and women, from Eve as she names the
animals in Eden to Joan of Arc to the transvestite farce of a young
man named Alice from the Wapping district of London. Whatever
they're doing--bopping boys with a baseball bat in "Hellfire
Hotchkiss," treating the author to a life story and a dogsled ride
in "The Esquimau Maiden's Romance," or sacrificing all for the sake
of a horse, as in "A Horse's Tale"--these women and girls are
surprising, provocative, and irresistibly entertaining in the great
Twain tradition in which they now finally take their rightful
place.
Albert Einstein famously remarked that he did not know what weapons
would be used in World War III, but World War IV would be fought
with sticks and stones. In this volume, a distinguished group of
scholars, government officials, politicians, journalists, and
statesmen examine what can be learned from the wars of the
twentieth century, and how that knowledge might help us as we step
ever so perilously into the twenty-first. Following an introduction
by Padraig O'Malley, the book is divided into four sections:
Understanding the World as We Have Known It; Global Uncertainties;
Whose Values? Whose Justice?; and Shaping a New World. The first
section reviews what we have learned about war and establishes
benchmarks for judging whether that knowledge is being translated
into changes in the behaviour of our political cultures. It
suggests that the world's premier superpower, in its effort to
promote Western-style democracy, has taken steps that have
inhibited rather than facilitated democratization. The second
section examines the war on terror and the concept of global war.
From the essays in this section emerges a consensus that democracy
as practiced in the West cannot be exported to countries with
radically different cultures, traditions, and values. The third
section visits the question of means and ends in the context of
varying value systems and of theocracy, democracy, and culture. In
the final section, the focus shifts to our need for global
institutions to maintain order and assist change in the
twenty-first century. Although each contributor comes from a
different starting point, speaks with a different voice, and has a
different ideological perspective, the essays reach startlingly
similar conclusions. In sum, they find that the West has not
absorbed the lessons from the wars of the last century, and is
inadequately prepared to meet the new challenges that now confront
us.
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